Based on Bryant, P., Lanclos, D., & Phipps, L., “Beyond the Borderlands: Reimagining the Competencies of Postdigital Educational Leadership in an Era of Coalescing Geopolitical Crisis.”
I, Peter Bryant, and Donna Lanclos had been at a conference for three days.
We had agreed to write a chapter on Postdigital Leadership and Crises.
So on a Friday in September 2024 we sat down with post-its and paper, and we started writing, writing about what we had seen in the sector over the last 25 years, what we had seen in the last 25 days, and what we’d experienced.
And if you work in a university, you’ll know how some things feel. Like the feeling that just as one emergency begins to subside, the next one rolls in. Such as funding shocks and policy lurches (the upheaval of the outgoing Blair – Brown Govt followed by the disastrous Cameron – Osbourne years for Higher Ed. And then austerity with a dose of Brexit), and the geopolitical turbulence, the pandemic’s long tail, the hype and hand-wringing, and the televangelism, around generative AI.
All of these things taken together create what Adam Tooze calls a polycrisis, a rolling state that reshapes our institutions and the people in them.
In the chapter “Beyond the Borderlands: Reimagining the Competencies of Postdigital Educational Leadership in an Era of Coalescing Geopolitical Crisis.” I, Peter Bryant, and Donna Lanclos, tried to make sense of leadership under these conditions.
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This post tries to distil that argument and, we hope, offers a way to not be forever in crisis mode.
Why “borderlands” and why “postdigital”?
The idea of borderlands is used to describe life in the in-between: neither pre-crisis stability nor a confidently imagined future, it’s a liminal space where identities, roles and routines are contested and uncertain. Borderlands are not natural in this context; they’re created by power, policy and culture. Borderlands are experienced by people unevenly depending on context and privilege. In universities, the borderlands show up in workload and wellbeing, in who gets a seat at the table and who doesn’t, in how resources, and agency are distributed. They can harm, but they can also be the place that creates new practices and collaborations.
The postdigital framing is crucial. Digital isn’t a separate bolt-on to the “real” work of the university; human and technological practices are entangled in everyday academic life. Leadership that treats the digital merely as systems, licenses or projects misses the point. Postdigital leadership recognises that decisions about technology are decisions about pedagogy, equity, identity and power.
Our three states of being
In the chapter, we simplify the complex rhythms of crisis into three states of being for institutions and their leaders:
Before crisis: not just a time on a calendar but also the narrative, the “remembered normal” we’re tempted to try and restore. Leadership in this space often focuses on recovery and rebuilding. The risk is that clinging to a before-crisis myth leaves us fragile, because the assumptions that failed last time are still there and still true.
Crisis: drawing on the original sense of crisis, the decision point, the modern university often inhabits crisis as a climate rather than a single event. Uncertainty becomes the water we swim in. Communication frays, silos harden, trust erodes, and people feel like they’re on a treadmill with no exit. These are classic symptoms of what we call the “confusion” state.
Post-crisis: the envisioned space where safety, ambition and care are thought possible. This is not a naïve utopia, it’s a practical stance that uses what we’ve learned to inoculate against the next shock. The point here is preparedness with purpose, not a return to a pre crisis normal.
Two leadership approaches
How do we move through the borderlands rather than set up permanent camp in them? We describe two complementary leadership approaches:
The crisis navigator gets people through the storm and back to safer waters: sense-making under pressure, rapid decision-making, care and empathy, and then the hard work of repair and rebuilding. Done well, this avoids collapse and restores basic function. Done badly, it snaps the university back to the conditions that left it vulnerable.
The crisis explorer uses what the crisis reveals to snap forward, to redesign structures, practices and cultures so the institution emerges different, not just recovered. This takes longer-range planning, courage in uncertainty, and a willingness to trade expediency for transformation.
Neither approach is sufficient by itself. The navigator prevents failure; the explorer makes future failures less likely and future possibilities more vivid. The sweet spot is a hybrid approach: agility today with a horizon that stretches beyond the next committee cycle.
Beware the “cadence of crisis”
But there’s a trap that we keep seeing. Organisations begin to profit from crisis rhythms. Urgency yields quick decisions, heroic narratives, and the short-term “sugar rush” of productivity. But the longer we live there, the more brittle and inequitable we become. Staff energy drains away, change fatigue sets in, and the promised “return to normal” or “new normal” keeps receding. That’s the cadence of crisis: a pattern that rewards reactivity and punishes reflection. Leaders must resist the perverse incentive to stay in a state of emergency.
So what should postdigital educational leadership do?
Here are the behaviours we argue for if we’re serious about escaping the borderlands:
Enable agency and coherence
The borderlands are noisy. Leaders should simplify where possible and distribute decision-rights where knowledge actually sits. That means building digital infrastructures that aid judgement, data that is timely and trustworthy, collaboration platforms that connect people across silos, and transparent processes that let good ideas travel.
Move from management to preparedness
Stabilisation is essential after a shock, but post-crisis leadership shifts quickly to strengthening capacity for the next one. Think scenario planning, stress-testing the curriculum portfolio, diversified revenue and partnerships, and investment in people’s adaptive skills (not only their immediate deliverables).
Practise ethical, not just agile, digital
Digital resilience isn’t only uptime. It’s equity of access, privacy, and the responsible use of AI, noticing who benefits and who bears the costs. Decisions about platforms and policies should be argued in terms of educational purpose and social responsibility, not just efficiency.
Institutionalise reflection
Don’t wait for the “after-action review” that never quite happens. Bake learning loops into everyday work: lightweight retrospectives, space for experimentation, visible acknowledgement of what didn’t work and why. Reflection is a collective muscle; it atrophies without use.
Rebuild trust deliberately
Crisis strains relationships: between senior teams and departments, between staff and students, between the university and its publics. Post-crisis leadership uses participatory governance, transparent communication, and inclusive policy-making to repair that connective tissue. Trust isn’t a communications problem; it’s a behaviour problem.
AI and the silo problem
The generative-AI moment has been illustrative. Too many leadership conversations are bounded by procurement, cheating and “access to tools”. These are important, yes, but far from the whole. When digital leadership is boxed into IT or compliance silos, the flows of information and influence we need in a crisis get distorted. Postdigital leadership insists that AI debates are educational and ethical debates first; systems follow purpose.
If you recognise your institution in any of this, here’s the work you need to do.
If you’re in a central leadership role: pair your navigator reflexes with explorer habits. When you sign off the contingency plan, also ask what would make that plan obsolete in two years because you changed the system. When you announce a “return to campus”, also redesign workload and recognition so that hybrid practices are sustainable and fair.
If you lead a faculty, a service or a programme: use your vantage point in the borderlands to push coherence up and out. Clarify what your team can control, what it can influence, and what it must simply be resilient to, make those boundaries explicit and negotiable.
If you’re an educator or professional colleague anywhere in the system: claim your agency. Crisis thrives on learned helplessness; preparedness grows where people feel permitted to experiment, to speak plainly about trade-offs, and to ask for the data and support they need.
Universities matter most when they give hope and aspiration, building lives. In a world where we see overlapping crises we can’t choose whether shocks arrive; but we can choose how we dwell in the borderlands. The work now is to stop treating crisis as a permanent home and start using it as a passage, to build institutions that are steadier, fairer and more imaginative than the ones we inherited.
That’s the promise of a postdigital leadership practice: not a fantasy of safety, but a disciplined, ethical, forward-leaning way of making the future.